Sexual Abuse at St. John's

This is a collection of all the links I've had since April 21, 2002 about the sexual abuse by monks at St. John's Abbey. Why am I doing it? Well, I knew some of the monks who have been accused. I also knew some of their victims. And when I first pointed to the stories back in April, I ended up getting email from a number of folks I knew from school who thanked me for finding the articles. I think keeping a list here is a worthwhile thing for me to do.

I've tried to keep my original comments in place with minimal editing here, but each link also has a pointer back to the day when I first commented on it, so you can read what I had to say as the story unfolded. Journalism, in the sense of keeping a journal.

Sadly, most of these links are dead, less than a month after the story started. The St. Cloud Times only keeps articles online for three days. The Star Tribune, only three weeks. Neither has set up a special archive section for these articles, and neither offers an option to purchase a copy of the article from the original link.

Abbey confines suspect priests, three of whom taught at St. John's Prep while I was attending high school there. There were rumors about the various boys in the school who were special friends with those monks. [linked 4/21/02]

Experts look at abbey for model in handling sex abusers. Like I've been saying, St. John's Abbey keeps the monks around and isolates them from the larger community, treating them over time. It's a better solution than dumping them out into the world with their problems. The only real problem I have with the handling of abuse at St. John's is that it took them so long to admit the problems publicly. [strib] [linked 5/5/02]

'94 report: Restrict this priest (Eckroth). Once again, it sounds like the Abbey was covering things up in the 80s and early 90s, but is dealing with the issue now. Better late than never, I guess. [linked 5/15/02]